Customer Profile
Gedeon Richter Plc. is a Hungarian multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company headquartered in Budapest, Hungary. The company was established in Budapest by Gedeon Richter, a pharmacist, in 1901, marking the beginning of the development of the Hungarian pharmaceutical industry.
Gedeon Richter sells products for gynecology, the central nervous system, and cardiology, among other therapeutic areas, and is one of the largest companies in its industry in the Central and Eastern European region with operations in over 40 countries.
The activities of the Hungarian-directed multinational company are vertically integrated and involve pharmaceutical manufacturing, research and development, and sales and marketing. Richter’s goal is to help the public fight illnesses with innovative products and, by doing so, help improve the quality of human life.
Gedeon Richter plc has a primary listing on the Budapest Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the BUX Index. It had a market capitalization of approximately $6,6 billion as of 2018, the third-largest of companies with a primary listing on the Budapest Stock Exchange. It has secondary listings on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange.
Business Challenges
Earlier, listed companies in the European Union region used to submit annual reports in PDF format to the regulators. Starting January 2020, the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF) mandate has replaced the PDF format with the Inline XBRL (iXBRL) format. XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. The iXBRL format renders published annual reports both human-readable and machine-readable, making the analysis and comparison of financial statements easier for investors and other stakeholders.
Gedeon faced the following business challenges:
- Tight Deadlines For The 2021 Annual Report Submission
When Gedeon was considering options for ESEF compliance software, they had in mind a vendor who could match their tight publication deadlines while also delivering a high-quality iXBRL document.
- High-Quality iXBRL Creation
The tight deadlines called for an ESEF compliance software vendor who could create a high-quality iXBRL document with a faster turnaround time. In short, team Gedeon was looking for a vendor with extensive experience in XBRL-based reporting, who had managed filings of excellent quality while working under stringent deadlines.
Project Objectives
Together with IRIS CARBON®, Gedeon began its ESEF compliance journey by prioritizing the most important challenges to work past. The objectives acted as a guide for both teams, enabling them to stay on track through the process. The objectives were:
The IRIS CARBON® Approach
Based on the specified objectives, IRIS CARBON® devised a five-step approach for Gedeon’s ESEF reporting. The approach involved…
- Calendar Planning with Gedeon Richter Plc
The first step towards an effective ESEF filing is calendar planning. The IRIS CARBON® and Gedeon teams marked the dates when important deadlines were to be met. They made sure well in advance that the company’s internal deadlines and ESEF reporting deadlines were in sync. This helped set up a realistic compliance timeline for Gedeon. Team IRIS CARBON® then equipped themselves with a support plan catering to Gedeon’s needs.
Team Gedeon indicated that the timelines at their end would be extremely tight and therefore requested IRIS CARBON® to expedite the iXBRL report creation.
- iXBRL Creation Of 2021 Annual Report For The Mandatory Filing
IRIS CARBON® received a mapped Excel file of Gedeon’s 2021 annual report which provided a good reference for tagging the company’s PDF annual report using the latest ESEF taxonomy elements. IRIS CARBON® applied the relevant tags to the document, also creating extension elements in the absence of appropriate ESEF taxonomy elements and defining their anchoring relationships. Team IRIS CARBON® expedited the process in keeping with the tight timelines.
IRIS CARBON® validated the files in a multi-layered quality review process to make sure they were error-free. This resulted in a supreme quality 2021 iXBRL annual report ready for a live filing. The report was then shared with Gedeon for their review.
- Review By Gedeon Richter Plc
Once Gedeon received the 2021 iXBRL annual report, IRIS CARBON® began training the client team at two levels, namely:
- a) The Review Of Tags
Team IRIS CARBON® covered significant concepts regarding the annual report review process during training sessions that were designed to help team Gedeon be comfortable using the software platform. Thereafter, the two-member Gedeon team used the IRIS CARBON® platform to review the 2021 iXBRL annual report.
The platform’s intuitive review module helped Gedeon approve the XBRL tags applied. For items that needed clarification, they used the platform’s ‘commenting’ feature to convey queries or change requests directly to IRIS CARBON®’s team of XBRL experts. The IRIS expert team was always on standby to respond to queries or change requests through the platform immediately.
An overview of the IRIS CARBON® dashboard helped team Gedeon track their progress in reviewing the 2021 iXBRL annual report. This dashboard showed whether a particular tag applied was approved, pending, or rejected. Team Gedeon could even view the status of comments (the number of comments addressed or pending).
The dashboard gave both teams real-time visibility of the review process and the status of the comments raised.
b)Validations
Another indispensable part of IRIS CARBON®’s review training process was the validation of the 2021 iXBRL annual report. An ideal ESEF compliance software runs validation checks and looks for any issues (errors or warning signs) in the tagged document.
IRIS CARBON® comes with an XBRL International-certified validator called IRIS Bushchat which helped Gedeon run validations in real-time and spot all the issues in their document. The issues were resolved quickly, saving much time and allowing the generation of an error-free and optimum-quality output file.
- Getting Approval By The Auditors
Once the iXBRL version of the 2021 annual report was created and reviewed by team Gedeon, it was time to share the document with the company’s auditors. After the auditors signed off on the document, team Gedeon could take it ahead for a live ESEF filing.
- Successful Live Filing With The Regulators And Publication
The last lap involved submitting Gedeon’s 2021 ESEF iXBRL annual report to the regulator in accordance with the mandatory guidelines. Gedeon then published the ESEF iXBRL package on their website.
Click here to go to Gedeon’s investor page and access the 2021 annual report in ESEF format.
“If you are looking for a collaborative software that promises supreme-quality reports within the fastest turnaround time, then IRIS CARBON® is the product I would strongly suggest.”
András Kulifai
Consolidation Expert
Key Results Achieved
Gedeon Richter and IRIS CARBON® could work closely and collaboratively to achieve the previously defined project objectives. Team Gedeon efficiently used IRIS CARBON® as their iXBRL reporting software, while team IRIS rolled up their sleeves to support the client at each step of the ESEF reporting process.
Summing up the key results accomplished by Gedeon:
